"What," Oskar muttered under his breath, "am I supposed to do now?"
No one answered.
Not Captain Carter. Not the Red Turbans. Not the Eternal Guards. Not the clerks frozen beside the ballot box. Not the townspeople of Salacgrīva, who had gathered to witness the birth of a new order and now found themselves watching the man who had proclaimed it hesitate beneath the weight of war.
For a moment, Oskar felt every eye upon him.
The square had changed while Carter read. The people no longer looked only at him as a monster, conqueror, prophet, or mad prince. They looked at him as men looked at a roof beam during a storm, wondering whether it would hold or break above their heads.
Some stared with awe. A few with the hungry devotion of men already half-converted. More watched with the dull calculation of ordinary people deciding which side seemed most likely to keep them alive. But beneath all that, Oskar saw the thing he hated most because it was the thing most difficult to crush quickly.
Doubt.
He saw it in the Russian soldiers standing near their surrendered rifles, hands empty while their hearts remained unconquered. He saw it in Lieutenant General Ugryumov near the fountain, bruised and humiliated, his pride broken but not dead. He saw it in the townsmen who would sign his registers today and betray them tomorrow if Russian guns returned. He saw it in priests wondering whether the New Dawn was salvation, heresy, or merely another boot placed upon the neck of God.
And yet there was good soil here too.
Young men stared at the red turbans as if they were not rags but crowns. Poor laborers listened when he spoke of law, courts, wages, and protection. Women watched more carefully than the men realized. Children looked up at the dragon banners with the wide eyes of those who had just seen a story break into the real world.
All of it was here at once: fear, hope, hatred, hunger, belief, and betrayal waiting for the right season.
That was mankind.
That was empire.
That was the work he had chosen for himself.
Oskar turned his head slightly toward the northeast.
Saint Petersburg.
The thought came to him like temptation.
The road was not open, not truly. There would be towns, villages, loyal officers, patrols, broken bridges, frightened garrisons, guards, guns, and whatever strength Russia could still gather around the capital. The Sixth Army still stood somewhere between him and the Tsar, and Nicholas would not be alone even if Oskar reached the city. There would be ministers, courtiers, palace guards, police, soldiers, and every terrified servant of empire trying to keep the monster from Germany away from their holy ruler.
But compared to what might come later, the road was open enough to make madness look like strategy.
He could ride.
He could take Shadowmane and go north like a black arrow through the Baltic coast. He could smash through patrols, terrify towns, raise Red Turbans behind him, spread panic ahead of him, and perhaps get close enough to the Tsar to force a message through the wall of generals and priests around him. Not face to face, perhaps. Not alone in some quiet chamber. But close enough to make Nicholas hear him.
Close enough to tell him that this war was wrong.
Russia and Germany should not have been enemies. Oskar believed that with a bitterness that had only grown as the dead multiplied. He had no true hatred for Russia itself, no ancient hunger to see its people ruined. He wanted the madness ended. He wanted Nicholas to understand that the war had already become a machine eating both nations alive, and that if the Tsar truly believed God had placed Russia in his hands, then he should stop feeding Russian sons into slaughter for the pride of men who would never stand in the mud themselves.
For one dangerous heartbeat, Oskar could almost see it: himself before the gates of power, blood-marked and half-mythic, demanding peace from another crowned man who believed heaven had chosen him.
Then the vision cracked.
He was not immortal.
Legends made people forget that. Sometimes even he forgot it for a moment. He was stronger than other men, faster, harder to kill, and blessed or cursed by whatever strange fire lived inside his chest, but he had not conquered death. Enough bullets could still find him. A shell could still burst close enough. Poison, exhaustion, drowning, fire, disease, a lucky blade, a hidden mine, one stupid mistake at the wrong moment—any of these could end him.
And if he died chasing the Tsar, everything behind him might rot before his body was cold.
The Northern Baltic Kingdom was still wet clay. Rennenkampf had a crown but not yet a kingdom. The Red Turbans had faith but not yet discipline. Salacgrīva had lowered its weapons but not yet changed its heart. The towns and villages ahead needed law, fear, food, and time. The Baltic islands needed policy. The Black Legion needed rest and orders. The front needed winter preparations.
And Berlin needed him most of all.
That was the thought that finally turned his frustration cold.
Moltke had failed before Paris. The western offensive had collapsed into the stalemate Oskar had feared, and men like Moltke would not simply lower their heads and accept judgment. His father would remove him, yes. History, logic, and failure all pointed there. But this was no longer the same Germany. Oskar had changed too much. Crown Prince Wilhelm still lived, locked away in madness at Babelsberg, and there were still men who remembered him as the proper heir. There were conservatives, courtiers, generals, religious fools, and old-minded aristocrats who looked at Oskar's machines, laws, women, armies, and cult of personality and saw not Germany's salvation, but the end of their own world.
Those men knew what was coming.
Oskar would not merely remove Moltke. He would cut out the men around him, break his faction, place loyalists where hesitation still lived, and bring the army and navy fully under his hand. Once that was done, he would not need the imperial crown to rule Germany in truth. His father could remain Emperor, but power would move through Oskar because the army, the factories, the navy, the police, the new faith, and the future would move through him.
Moltke and his allies would know that.
Men who saw their own extinction approaching did not always wait politely for it.
If Oskar returned too late, Berlin might already be full of knives.
He exhaled slowly.
Saint Petersburg waited ahead like a door he still wanted to kick open.
Berlin burned behind him with quieter, deadlier fire.
The Baltics needed a founder. The islands needed a decision. The Eastern Front needed time. The Western Front had failed. Russia bled but did not break.
And he had only one body.
For a moment, Oskar looked across the square again. The people were still watching him. Friends, enemies, cowards, believers, opportunists, future traitors, future citizens—all waiting to see whether the man who had claimed the right to reshape their lives could first command his own chaos.
The answer came slowly, but when it came, it hardened in him.
He could not chase every flame.
He had to choose the fire that would burn the whole house down if left alone.
Oskar looked at Captain Carter.
"Captain."
Carter straightened at once.
"Yes, Your Highness."
"Send my orders to Warsaw," Oskar said. "Hindenburg and Ludendorff are to hold the line and build new defensive belts. No grand counterattack. No glory. Not unless the whole front depends on it. Until I return, the Black Legion is to do what it was built to do: bend where it must, hold where it can, and make every Russian step cost blood."
Carter opened his notebook and began writing, but Oskar's eyes had already drifted south, toward the ruined belt of land he could almost see in his mind. The Dead Zone. The mud. The smoke. The bodies. If Russia still wished to fight after that, then the next phase would not be a contest of banners and maps. It would be a quieter, colder, uglier thing.
"They are to prepare for winter now," he continued. "Not when snow is already falling. Now. The army must be ready to live, move, dig, shoot, and kill in cold weather. If this war does not end before winter, then winter will become part of the battlefield."
Carter wrote quickly.
"And there is to be a new emphasis," Oskar said. "Scoped rifles. Camouflage. Concealment. Sniper squads, not merely pairs of marksmen sent forward and forgotten. Any man with the eyes, patience, and discipline for that work is to be found and trained. I want officers, couriers, artillery observers, engineers, and supply men made afraid of every treeline and every broken window."
The square had gone quiet around him. Some of the townspeople understood only pieces, but the tone was clear enough. Oskar was no longer speaking as a prophet or a lawgiver. He was speaking as a commander deciding how men would die.
He knew what the order meant.
And he did not want to do this, but peace would not come because he wished for it. Peace would come when the men on the other side learned that continuing the war brought only misery, fear, and loss. If Russia could not yet be reasoned with, then Russia had to be exhausted until reason became attractive.
"Tell them I want pressure without waste," he said. "The enemy has chosen mass. We will answer with precision. From now until I return to the front, victory in the east is not measured by ground. It is measured by how much strength we remove from the enemy."
Carter's pen paused for the smallest moment, then continued.
Oskar saw it, and he did not blame him.
The words sounded harsh even to himself, but the world had become harsh before he was born into it. All he could do was master the cruelty and aim it.
"Send also to Berlin," he said. "Tell my father I will return to the capital within a week if God and the enemy permit it. I will attend the emergency council. Before that, no major strategic decision should be made without me."
Carter looked up.
"Your Highness, may I ask where you are going first?"
Oskar turned his gaze westward, toward the unseen sea beyond the roofs.
"To my uncle."
"Prince Heinrich?"
"Yes. The Baltic islands must be settled before winter. If the islands remain uncertain, then the sea road to Riga and the northern coast remains uncertain. And if the sea road becomes unsafe, this kingdom will depend too much on land routes that mud, snow, sabotage, or Russian raiders can choke whenever they please."
Carter understood at once.
"You intend to go by sea?"
"If the Russians are polite enough to leave me a boat. Otherwise, I will swim."
Carter's expression tightened, not in confusion, but in the way of a soldier hearing an order he already disliked.
"And I assume," he said carefully, "that Your Highness does not intend to take us with you."
Oskar looked at him then, and for a moment the hardness in his face eased.
"No, Captain. I need you here."
Carter's jaw set, but he did not argue.
"The Third Company has guarded my back well enough," Oskar said. "Now I need it to guard what I have made. Help Rennenkampf's men. Help Father Nikolai. Help the Red Turbans become more than armed converts with cloth around their heads. Keep the elections from turning into disorder. Spread the charter. Secure the towns. Let those who accept the new order live under it, and let those who refuse leave under the law. But if rebellion rises, then you have my blessing to do whatever you must to stop it."
Carter struck his fist to his heart.
"As you command, Your Highness."
"And to help you," Oskar added, glancing toward Shadowmane, "I leave you my most loyal friend."
Carter froze. So, in a strange way, did the square.
Shadowmane lifted his head from the butcher's offering near the steps. One dark, intelligent eye fixed on Oskar, and the great black stallion seemed to understand entirely too much of what had just been said.
Oskar walked down from the steps and placed one hand against Shadowmane's neck. Rain and sunlight both rested on the stallion's hide, and beneath Oskar's palm the beast felt warm, powerful, and terrible, like some ancient thing wearing the shape of a horse only because the world had no better word for him.
"My friend," Oskar said quietly, first in German and then in Russian so those nearby could understand, "look after them. Look after Carter. Look after our new friends. Lead them well."
Shadowmane stared at him for several seconds.
Then he snorted and stamped one hoof against the cobblestones.
The sound rang across the square.
Oskar smiled faintly.
"I will take that as agreement."
Carter looked from Oskar to Shadowmane and back again, as if trying to decide whether this was a command, an honor, a punishment, or the beginning of a military disaster no academy had prepared him for.
Before he could find an answer, a shout came from the direction of the coast.
A Red Turban legionary came running into the square, boots slipping on wet stone, his red cloth soaked dark with rain and sea spray. It was Jānis Ozols. His face was flushed, his breathing ragged, and when he reached Oskar he dropped to one knee so abruptly that water splashed around him.
"My lord!" he gasped. "Your Highness—the enemy at sea."
Oskar turned fully toward him.
"What enemy?"
"A Russian destroyer," Jānis said, pointing back toward the harbor road. "It is laying mines offshore. The fishermen saw them dropping into the water. We do not know how close. If they finish, the harbor will be death."
Carter swore under his breath.
Oskar did not.
He only looked toward the coast.
Of course.
Of course there would be one more problem. One more knife placed exactly where he needed a road. Mines were patient weapons. They did not need courage. They did not need a soldier to stand and fight. They waited beneath the water until some future ship, some future supply boat, some future wounded transport or fishing vessel found them by mistake.
Oskar rolled his shoulders once and sighed.
"All right," he said. "I will handle it."
Carter stepped forward at once.
"Your Highness, we can send men. We can signal the fleet, find a boat, organize—"
"I said I will handle it."
Carter stopped.
Oskar checked the ruined sword across his back, then glanced once more at Shadowmane.
"Take care of them."
Shadowmane snorted, softer this time, as if offended that the instruction had to be repeated.
Then Oskar turned and ran.
For half a second, the square did not understand what it was seeing. He did not jog like a man leaving on some errand, nor sprint like a soldier crossing open ground. He launched himself down the street in great, impossible strides, bare feet striking the wet cobblestones hard enough to send water bursting behind him. Each step carried him several meters. His body leaned forward, the black sword shifting against his back, pale hair streaming behind him as the air curled around his passing.
A woman cried out. A child laughed in terror. Several Russian soldiers stared with their mouths open.
Oskar vanished between the buildings in flashes of pale skin, wet blond hair, torn white cloth, and black steel, moving toward the sea faster than any man had a right to move.
For a few seconds, no one spoke.
Then every eye in the square turned slowly back toward Shadowmane.
The stallion stood beside the town hall steps, enormous and black, chewing the last of the butcher's offering with calm satisfaction. He seemed entirely aware of the attention and entirely pleased by it.
Father Nikolai stepped forward first.
The old priest's red turban was damp, his beard wet, his eyes bright with that terrible certainty which had been growing in him since Riga. He looked toward the street where Oskar had disappeared, then toward the steed Oskar had left behind.
His expression changed.
Captain Carter saw it happen and felt dread settle into his stomach.
"No," Carter muttered.
Father Nikolai dropped to his knees before Shadowmane.
"The Prince has left us his steed," he said, voice trembling with awe. "The beast that carried him through fire. The horse that feared no cannon, no rifle, no army of men. Until our lord returns, we follow Shadowmane."
Several Red Turbans knelt at once.
Then more.
The movement spread through the square with frightening speed. Some townspeople knelt because they believed. Others knelt because everyone around them was kneeling and standing alone before a carnivorous black stallion suddenly seemed unwise. Even a few surrendered Russians lowered themselves awkwardly, watching the beast as if it might judge the angle of their heads.
Captain Carter closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"Of course," he said quietly. "Of course this is happening."
Shadowmane lifted his head, took in the kneeling square, and gave a deep, satisfied snort.
Then he stamped one hoof.
The Red Turbans bowed lower.
Carter opened his eyes. The Eternal Guards were looking at him. The Red Turbans were looking at the horse. The townspeople were looking at everyone. Shadowmane was looking at Carter.
Carter sighed.
Then, with the weary dignity of a man who had survived war, parachute drops, rooftop fighting, a holy rebellion, and several days of Oskar's improvisational statecraft, he turned to the Third Company.
"Eternal Guards."
The black-armored men straightened.
Carter looked at Shadowmane.
Shadowmane stared back.
Carter's mouth tightened.
"Kneel before the horse."
For one stunned second, even the Eternal Guards hesitated. Then discipline conquered disbelief. And one by one, they lowered themselves to a knee before Shadowmane.
The stallion's ears flicked forward. He looked, if anything, more satisfied.
Carter pointed one armored finger at him.
"Do not do anything insane," he said quietly. "Please."
Shadowmane showed his teeth. It might have been a threat, or perhaps a smile. Carter did not find either possibility comforting.
He looked toward the eastern road, then toward the red dragon banner newly raised over Salacgrīva.
"Very well," he said at last. "We secure Latvia first. Town by town. Parish by parish. After that, Estonia."
Father Nikolai lifted his head, eyes shining.
"Under the Prince?"
Carter looked at Shadowmane, who stamped once more as if approving the plan.
Carter sighed.
"Under the Prince," he said, "and, apparently, under the horse."
The Red Turbans bowed lower.
Shadowmane stood before them like a black idol in the sunlight, wet mane hanging over his neck, bone fragments at his feet.
And down the road toward the coast, Oskar ran toward the sea, the mines, and the Russian destroyer waiting beyond the harbor.